Posts Published in March 2011

Who says you need uber-expensive lighting equipment to shoot nice-looking studio portraits? In this video, photographer Bert Stephani shows us what you can do with cheap halogen work lights (you can find them for about $30-$50) and a couple shower curtains.

This cute little vintage twin-lens reflex camera by Chinese stationary company deli is actually a pencil sharpener in disguise. Instead of loading it with film, simply stick a pencil into the top “lens” and turn the handle on the back to sharpen it. It has an adjustable sharpness knob, and the top half pulls out when you need to dump the pencil shavings.Read more…

The Bang Bang Club is the real life story of a group of four young combat photographers – Greg Marinovich, Joao Silva, Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbroek – bonded by friendship and their sense of purpose to tell the truth. They risked their lives and used their camera lenses to tell the world of the brutality and violence associated with the first free elections in post Apartheid South Africa in the early 90s. This intense political period brought out their best work (two won Pulitzers during the period) but cost them a heavy price. [#]

You’ve all seen multi-photo picture frames before, but the “Comic Strip Picture Frame” goes a step further by providing 45 speech bubble stickers (and a pen) that allow you to turn the frame into a comic strip. You can buy one for $18 over on Perpetual Kid — or you can just take this idea and create your own speech/thought bubbles.

We may soon be using software that can easily recreate 3D models of objects and locations using only a series of photographs taken from various perspectives. Researchers in Microsoft’s Interactive Visual Media Group have created an application that does this, generating smooth and seamless 3D views of things using photos taken while walking around the object. In the demo above, we see what the software can do with 40 images shot while walking around a car. It’s pretty amazing.

The mobile photo sharing space is hot right now, with services like Instagram, Picplz, and Path growing like weeds. A new contender called Color is causing some buzz after successfully raising a whopping $41 million… before even launching. The company has seven notable founders who have either started successful companies in the past (e.g. Lala and BillShrink) or have held executive positions at them (LinkedIn). Among the investors is Sequoia Capital, one of the most influential and successful firms in Silicon Valley and the firm that funded Google. They gave Color more than they gave Google.Read more…

I imagine, almost everyone interested in photography has seen the stunning pictures created with a technique called light painting. You set your camera to long exposure, 20 to 30 seconds or even longer, and use a light source, a flashlight or LED light, to “paint” with it. Most pictures have some kind of magic touch to it because you see only the track of light afterwards and not the actual light source. Light stencils are somewhat related to light painting. It uses the long exposure as well but uses a flash to illuminate a stencil to stamp the motive into the picture.Read more…

Here’s a neat gift idea (especially with Mother’s Day coming up): take your favorite portrait and have it printed on a beautiful notepad! Joanna Goddard made the above notepad using a photograph of her son Toby. Pinhole Press is a company that can help you make your own, and a 50 page one will cost you $13.

Last month we reported that a Flickr photographer had found his photograph of a car being used as a Gap clothing design without his permission. It now appears that appropriating images from the web wasn’t limited to that design, nor just the Gap brand — Old Navy, another brand owned by Gap, is now being accused of stealing a car photograph as well. A photographer was strolling around in an Old Navy store in El Centro, California when he came across a shirt that he just couldn’t stop staring at. It featured a Land Cruiser that look remarkably similar to one he had photographed before.Read more…